Is Sun Tzu's "The Art of War," one of Trump's inspirations ?
One of Trump's inspirations, judging by how often he used to tweet passages from it, is Sun Tzu's "The Art of War," which contains some instructions about how to maintain such loyalty.
"If soldiers are punished before a personal attachment to the leadership is formed," it says, "they will not submit, and if they do not submit, they are hard to employ." When it comes to voters, Trump turns out to have followed this advice quite closely. While promising them, at great length, the rebirth of the coal industry and the instant replacement of Obamacare, he instilled in them an enduring personal attachment.
And that bond has allowed him to characterize the incomplete realization of those promises as failures of the political machine he swore to combat, rather than as examples of his own inadequacy.
-- Sasha Chapin, author of the forthcoming book "The Perfect Information Game."